Tag: healing

Welcome to this weekly bonus series of brief stories designed to touch your heart and offer you comfort, joy, laughter, and inspiration as we face uncertain times together! Remember always to choose LOVE over fear!

Story 11: To everything there is a season

To everything there is a season

Featured Verse: Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Learn how love can transform and heal our lives even during our last days.

In Part 6 of the Mortal Wisdom Series I’ll discuss how our broken hearts allow us to expand our capacity to carry and transmit pure Love. Throughout life we are broken open by love in many different ways and must learn to remain open to love rather than hardened and resistant to it so that we can find peace at the end of life.These are the lessons we can learn from our mortality and how to thrive in life while knowing that death awaits. Listen to Parts 1- 5 first if you haven’t heard them yet!

Learn how to make the most of the present moment and give the gift of presence to those you love.

In Part 4 of the Mortal Wisdom Series I’ll discuss how to develop the skill of Presence to use in your personal life and work. Presence is the secret of living fully in every moment and you’ll learn how to enhance your ability to stay focused and present in day-to-day life. These are the lessons we can learn from our mortality and how to thrive in life while knowing that death awaits. Listen to Parts 1, 2, and 3 first if you haven’t heard them yet!

Find out how a psychiatrist is successfully helping veterans with unhealed trauma by using alternative practices.

In this episode I am featuring an interview from the Death & Afterlife Summit with Dr. Jeff Black, a psychiatrist who uses unconventional methods to successfully treat trauma in veterans. A few clips of this interview were featured in the Suicide Series and I wanted to share the entire interview with you.

As a follow-up to the Suicide SeriesI want to further address the issue of suicide in veterans: at this time 22 veterans take their own lives every day. This statistic is a heartbreaking tragedy and it’s time we work hard to help heal the emotional and spiritual burden that veterans bring home from war. Dr. Black and others describe the aftermath of trauma as “soul loss” and he uses shamanic rituals to help his patients recover the pieces of their souls that have been taken away by war.

In Episode 92 I performed a Fire Ceremony for my father to heal his wounds and to release my grief. This was recommended to me by Dr. Black and during the ceremony I felt the power of ritual to transform our losses into grace. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Jeff Black.

Today Dr. Karen Wyatt thanks her supporters on Patreon.com/eolu whose generous donations help keep this podcast on the air!

She talks about the Death Expo 2016 which starts this week on November 10th. You can sign up at DeathExpo.com and read about all 12 of the speaker for this FREE online event.

Next Dr. Wyatt shares some thoughts about the upcoming presidential election here in the U.S. While she doesn’t take sides or share any particular political beliefs she describes the fact that the U.S. electorate seems maximally polarized and divided over this election, with each side predicting “doomsday” if the other side wins. She goes on to say:

the day after the election will begin a period of grief for each candidate and their “teams”: the losing candidate will grieve over all the money, time, energy and life force spent in this costly battle; the victor will hardly celebrate the win because the “prize” is to take on responsibility for re-uniting the whole and to embrace those from the opposing side who now must be governed with reason and compassion.

the irony of this election process is that no matter how different others appear to be from us, we are actually far more alike that we are different. We are all mortals–human incarnations of Spirit–just trying to survive here on planet Earth. But each of us will ultimately die and that is our most powerful common bond. We each share mortality and an innate fear of death.

Death is the most uniting force we have if we look at it from a higher perspective.

Sogyal Rinpoche said, “Life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change.” Ultimately change is what we seem to be seeking through our political process: we want others to change, the government to change, the system to change–all so that we don’t have to change ourselves. But the only meaningful change is the change we create within ourselves.

Here is a recommendation for a daily practice:

contemplate your inner landscape and seek out the parts of you that fear change; the parts that harbor anger, hatred, negativity

seek to understand your own pain and your wounds that cause you to react with anger and fear; journal about them and spend time contemplating them

be aware of your behavior in relationships: what triggers your negative emotions? what causes you to lash out or shut down?

embrace the wounded parts of yourself so that they can heal

find the still point of equanimity within you and cultivate that; learn to operate from that place so that you can bring peace and healing to volatile situations

No matter how different you feel you are from your neighbors, family, and Facebook friends remember that Death ultimately unites us all as one. Contemplate your own death and allow the small deaths, the thousand changes that come to you every day, to move you forward. That’s how you will help the nation and our society heal again.

Check out the book The Tao of Death which has verses to help you contemplate death every day in your practice!

Sign up for Death Expo 2016 now so you won’t miss a single interview! Tune in every Monday and until next week remember:

Death & Dying Class Instructor Training

NOW AVAILABLE: Death & Dying Class Instructor Training

If you’ve always wanted to teach about Death & Dying issues this self-paced course will guide through the process of putting a class together. The course consists of 4 video modules (each about 1 hour long) and includes occasional Q&A calls with Dr. Wyatt and a private Facebook group for networking with other students.

A Year of Reading Dangerously

Sign up for A Year of Reading Dangerously and join us online in reading one book a month about death and dying for 2020! Learn more here.

AVAILABLE May 2020:

7 Lessons for Living from the Dying: How to Nurture What Really Matters

From Watkins Publishing:

There is no life without death.

The aim of this book is to ease our terror of death so that we can contemplate our own deaths, and those of our loved ones, with less regret, disappointment and fear, and to learn to live with more freedom and joy.

Collected here are uplifting stories of transformation and healing gathered by Dr Karen Wyatt from the hospice patients in her care. She offers the seven key lessons the dying taught her, from suffering (“embrace your difficulties”) and love (“let your heart be broken”) to forgiveness (“hold no resentments”) and impermanence (“face your fear”).

The sometimes challenging, always inspiring real-life stories are combined with guidance on absorbing the 7 lessons into our lives through meditation and other spiritual practices. Teaching us what really matters in life, the dying show us how to live our best lives now with meaning, purpose and love.

End-Of-Life University Podcast

End-of-Life University

Real talk about life and death

Dr. Karen Wyatt, hospice physician and author of "What Really Matters," interviews experts on all aspects of the end-of-life, including: caring for the dying, funeral and burial practices, planning for the end-of-life, conscious dying, grief and loss, caregiver support, afterlife, death and the arts, and community initiatives to improve end-of-life care. Access more interviews at www.eoluniversity.com

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